From a very early age children love to learn new things, and not only do they love to learn, they are experts at it. Children learn by playing, observing, doing, testing ideas and pushing boundaries. In many ways the way in which children learn is the same way a basic scientific study would be conducted: start with a bit of knowledge, come up with a hypothesis based on that bit of knowledge, test and learn from the outcome (good or bad).

And this is a practice that should be encouraged, nurtured and built upon. Science is not only a great subject because of the things that can eventually be done with it, but because of the life skills that it also teaches along the way.

So what are the life skills that science can teach? Check out the following infographic created by psychology and science website psysci to read about 8 of them:

One of the most common questions I get when I tell people that I write about citizen science is: can you give me a citizen science definition?

For many years, that wasn’t an easy question to answer. For one thing, no one had really settled on a name for the concept. Terms used to refer to the subject have included participatory science, participatory action research, participatory monitoring, civic science, civic scientists, citizen scientists, and even crowdsourced science. Phew!

There has also been a lot of discussion over what the term should cover, in terms of scope, and where it belonged. Was it a topic for people involved in the investigation of the public understanding of science? Did it fall under science communication studies? Or what about science, technology, and society scholarship? Fiona Clark and Deborah Illman would lament, in a 2001 paper, that “concepts and terms used in the literature and the press to characterize civic scientists and civic science have been ambiguous, if not conflicting.”

A few years later, in 2004, Bruce Lewenstein of Cornell University attempted to pin it down with a three-part definition:

the participation of nonscientists in the process of gathering data according to specific scientific protocols and in the process of using and interpreting that data;

the engagement of nonscientists in true decision-making about policy issues that have technical or scientific components; and

the engagement of research scientists in the democratic and policy process.

As you can see, there was a fair amount of overlap between the concepts of scientific research, scientific policy-making, and even science advocacy.

By 2009, Jonathan Silvertown was defining citizen scientists as volunteers who collect and/or process data as part of a scientific enquiry. While simpler, this definition caused some consternation because it specified volunteers (leaving out anyone who might be a nonscientist, yet paid for his/her efforts), and it didn’t leave any room for citizen science work in the creation and management of projects. For example, after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan, a group of citizens would band together to create Safecast.

Citizen Science refers to the general public engagement in scientific research activities when citizens actively contribute to science either with their intellectual effort or surrounding knowledge or with their tools and resources.

This was better, and more inclusive, but still a mouthful.

Fast forward to last year, and the concept had become a movement, and the definition had been polished and simplified… at least, outside of academia and according to the Oxford dictionary. In it’s June 2014 update, the term citizen science was officially added to the Oxford Dictionary and defined as:

scientific work undertaken by members of the general public, often in collaboration with or under the direction of professional scientists and scientific institutions.

This is a pretty good definition, and I can just imagine how much debate, argument, and general wordsmithing had to go into it. It’s inclusive of a number of different types of citizen science projects, while keeping the scope vis-a-vis science policy and decision making under control.

It’s certainly how I think about citizen science when deciding what to write up for this blog. Then again, I might be biased, as I came up with something reasonably similar here. 😉

I’ve been covering the citizen science movement for a very long time now; indeed, I’ve been writing about citizen science in one form or another since before it was really a movement.

Recently, I sat down and had a think about what I had seen in the past, as well as some of trends that I’ve been noticing. Today, I’m going to review some of those and also go out on a limb with some predictions as to where I see citizen science heading.

It’s Definitely a Thing, Now

In the last three or so years, I’ve noticed a sharp increase in the amount of mainstream interest in citizen science. Where it was once just the province of a smaller group of hardcore geeks (think: early adopters of the SETI@Home client), it now seems like everyone is talking about citizen science. Anecdotally, I’ve been interviewed by a fairly wide range of media outlets — everything from CBC Radio to Woman’s World. On the hard data side, this screen shot of the Google Trends entry on citizen science bears this out:

Open source, participatory civics, activism, maker spaces, crowdfunding: citizen science is part of an even broader shift across many segments of society, and in some cases it’s increasingly hard to see where one movement begins and another ends.

There are an increasing number of citizen science games, some with the data processing and manipulation right out front like EteRNA, and some not quite so much, like Reverse the Odds. This not to be confused with the gamification of citizen science projects: that is, the addition of game elements like leaderboards, badges, scoring, etc., to an otherwise non-game-based project. (The jury is still out as to how effective gamification is at improving user retention.)

Point and Click Projects Are Here to Stay… For a While

Zooniverse has pretty much perfected the model of citizen science projects wherein users are presented with a bit of data (most often an image) and are asked to perform a simple task (usually identify and locate a specific feature). As more and more people get interested in citizen science in general, the platform (and others like it) will likely continue to register new users faster than it ‘loses’ them. This is a good thing, because the participation dropoff curves appear to be pretty steep. Eventually, however, as more interesting ways to do citizen science continue to proliferate, and if we ever see a ‘peak citizen science’ (i.e., the most number of people likely to do citizen science are already doing it), this will no longer be the case.

On the flip side, I think that image processing technology will replace the need for human participation here sooner, rather than later, in part because mega-companies like Google and Baidu are throwing boatloads of money at the problem, and because technology improvement curves are much steeper than we realize.

But Apps are Where It’s At

The number of citizen science apps — and by this I mean the programs that run on tablets or smartphones — is going up, and that has opened up a whole new frontier in citizen science. Whereas before, most citizen science has been about data processing, apps allow for more data collection. Apps like Sound Around You or Loss of the Night are good examples.

However, I think we’ve only just barely scratched the surface of what’s possible with current mobile technology. The average smart phone now comes with an accelerometer, a camera, a video camera, a magnetometer, an ambient light detector, GPS, and obviously, a speaker and a microphone, all as standard equipment. Considering how creative people are getting with simple GoPro cameras and their special mounts, or cameras attached to drones just for fun, there’s clearly a lot of scope for some much more interesting citizen science apps than what we’re currently doing.

That Internet of Things We Keep Hearing About

As sensors become cheaper and cheaper, and the Internet becomes even more ubiquitous, the average citizen, with or without connection to an official citizen science project, will soon be able to measure and track pretty much anything. (Seriously, check out those links to see what’s coming, especially if you’re looking for ideas.) Anyone will be able to deploy sensors, and this will in turn generate huge amounts of highly granular data. Indeed, most of us will deploy sensors, even if not entirely deliberately, because they’re going to be embedded in the products we use.

In some ways, we’re just beginning to build a massive nervous system for ourselves and our planet, and it’s going to teach us all sorts of amazing things. We don’t yet know what we don’t know.